136 - The beginning of the end

Before an individual presents bad news to others, sometimes they will feel the need to mention that it breaks their heart to even say this, that even the very act of presenting upsetting information evokes in them a sense of helpless shame and sadness before they've even brought others into that same dark place. They may also phrase it in a slightly different way, the clichéd old line of there's-no-easy-way-to-say-this-so-I'm-just-gonna-say-it. Most of the time when people utter these words, they aren't really thinking hard about what their words imply. These two approaches to sharing thorny matters are effectively meaningless and false, because they miraculously provide the user with the exact 'easy way to say it' that he/she so desperately needs, but perhaps sacrificing the level of concern that should be raised - as if those disclaimers make it easier to bear. Saying it is easy any way you do it. It's deciding what you're going to do next that's the hard part.

This is going to sound very egotistical, but I feel that my whole life is a hard one, with many hard parts. I have come to realize that I have an aversion to doing things the easy way. I find myself thirsting for challenge all the time. On multiple levels of consciousness, I create the Hell I so mention in this blog's title, and proclaim it to be some sort of epic battle against the odds. But I don't believe in chances. My faith lies in the individual paving his own path to walk on, and any challenges that arrive in the near future are those reared from his very own actions in the recent past. Not long ago, a friend of mine told me that she notices from this blog that I always try to give everything in my life a logical cause - a reason for their happening or existence. She hit the nail right on the head with that comment. I need to rationalize. And the idea of fate or destiny just never seems very rational to me. I want to attribute everything that happens to me... to me.

And so whenever I'm faced with a problem nowadays, I like to think about what I can do about it. I draw from experiences in the past, I analyze their relevance to the present dilemma, and I make plans for the imminent future. I don't believe that the hands of fate exist and can help me. I have to take matters into my own hands. I know my livelihood isn't that hard, as long as I try not to think too much. While I tend to inflate the severity of my stress, I also tend to exaggerate my own ability to deal with such stress. I often forget who I really am and what I'm capable of. And I forget what matters to me because I'm thinking too hard and there's just too much going through my mind.

Who I am is very simple. As it has always said on every online profile I have, I am an 18-year-old, Filipino-Chinese student living in the UK, and originally from Hong Kong. I'm also a TV fanatic, an avid reader, a food zealot, an aspiring forensic anthropologist, an inborn outdoorsman, a learned bartender, an ambitious globetrekker, an internet addict, and a passionate Pokémon master. There's one thing not on the list, but I'll get to that soon. Despite all of that, though... I'm afraid there's one of those terms that just bears greater weight on who I really am and should be than all the rest.


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And so here I must finally tell you what this 'bad news' is, how this is 'the beginning of the end', and how everything I've talked about so far comes together. Now, it really does bum me out to now tell you that for maybe as long as a year now, I disliked blogging a lot. I didn't want to. And the logical reason as to why I continued to blog in spite of that was to feel like I was trying to conquer some challenge, like I talked about earlier, and avoid the easy way out, which was to simply stop blogging. I mentally overstated my own capabilities and I ended up posting over a hundred posts, on four/five different blogs, that I was not proud of or happy with. It was a big mistake, my own mistake, reared by my actions in the recent past. While I went through this Hell I put myself in, I got lost, and I forgot who I really am.

But who I am is and has always been very simple. I'm just a university student - that is what I have been taught, been molded, and been working to be for my entire life. Along the way, I found 'additions' to my life, but the basic foundation is my student status. I don't consider myself a writer. I may write well, but that doesn't mean I feel... like being a writer. I have always known in my heart that truth, and nothing anybody says to me can change my mind about that. I'm just a guy who wants to talk about my life and meet some interesting people in the blogosphere along the way. I don't want publicity, I don't want money, I don't actually think of this as practicing writing, and I absolutely hate how crowded these sidebars have become.

I just want to be me. Being anything else... is the hard way, the hard part...

So, while I was sitting here considering what I should do before I started writing this post, I looked back at my experiences in the past, and observed that I tend to enjoy my life most when I'm given a fresh start. Having a clean slate invigorates me, gives me motivation that will sharply contrast the indifference I've had for so many months. I'm going to announce the end of this blog and Do you hate it too? sometime in mid-April. Then, sometime between April and July, I will start a brand new blog, with a brand new look, and a brand new focus on just me. No gimmicks, no funny business, just my honest thought and emotion painted on a clean canvas. I'll probably post once or twice before I announce that end in mid-April just to tease about the new blog and inform you of how you can be notified about it ASAP when I launch it.

But for now, I think we'll just leave the news-sharing at that. I'm sorry it took me a while to say something. And I'm sorry that this one and Do you hate it too? have to come to an end. I never envisioned it, but hey, maybe that little thing called 'fate' that I don't believe in will bring me to blog on them again. After reading this, I hope that you realize that for me, there really was no easy way to say this, and that I'm not just saying that without thinking about what those words mean. It truly, genuinely, seriously breaks my heart.  It's sad to have to think about saying goodbye to something that was a part of you for a long time.  But I guess it's just another white hair on the top of my head. Or another immobile, dormant white dwarf in the universe. Or maybe it's the first signs of white light at the end of a tunnel.

121 - How do we know that's the right thing to do?

Every few months or so, I get told that I think too much, that I'm over-complicating things and I should learn to just relax and let the little things go. My defense mechanism to counter these claims is substitution by alternative phrasing. Instead, I call it logical reasoning. I call it careful assessment of my situation. I call it elaboration. I call it attention to detail. I call it keeping a critical eye. I call it making an informed decision. I call it wisdom. I call it not judging a book by its cover. I call it an evaluation. I call it reflection. I call it effective writing. I call it a rant. I call it a simple train of thought. I call it the pursuit of clarity. And last but not least, I also call it my blog.

I call my obsessive-compulsive infatuation with specification by a great number of titles, all with the aim of shrouding my immoderate committal, my limitless passion, my exorbitant ambition towards the practice of rationality, due to which I strive to act in the most sensible, practical way possible, that reaps the most benefit with the least hindrance, but truth be told, I'm a walking, and way too often, talking, load of bullshit.

Because somehow, despite my incredibly analytical mentality, bad things still happen. Call it fated by the wrong pantheon of gods, call it rotten luck, call it the very consequence of my excessive contemplation - bad things happen to me, around me, because of me, anyway, in spite of the fact that I try so hard to avoid setbacks and tribulations and the other half of reality that doesn't go the way I want it to. And the only thing that seems right to do at this point, is to push myself harder, and harder, and harder, and harder, until the finish line brings a peace and harmony to my life that took years, and decades, what feels like my entire life to reach.

But that's not the way it works at all. The way it really works is one never truly feels completely matured. One never feels old enough. One never feels like they're one step ahead in life. One can never learn the ideal combination of life lessons that will allow for pure faultlessness of existence. We are forever young and inexperienced. We are forever surprised, and unprepared to face the obstacles on our journey. Just when you think you have it altogether, one tiny little thing screws up, and then another thing gets spoiled as a result. And then it's like the house of cards just came tumbling down, just as you were putting down the last 7 and King for its roof.

I feel like it's time to start all over again. But then again, it's always time to start all over again. There's always something going wrong, just as there's always something going right. There's always something to mend, and once you've fixed it, something else has shattered, something else fell off the table, or that first thing was vandalized after you had just cleaned it up. There's never any time to simply stop. There's never time to feel perfect. It's always something - something that makes you look and feel like an overly complacent idiot.

I wish I could mean it when I say that the trick is not to get too caught up with it all. But I don't think I, or anyone else, can perform that phenomenal trick. That is actual magic.

So I don't know what to do. And I forgot what my initial point was. I hope this was enthralling literature for you nonetheless. For the seventh time tonight, I'm going to go to bed, and try and fall asleep.

115 - What is the point of a relationship?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Why do people bother with the expensive phone bills, sharing the popcorn, and the highly stressful situations like introducing your partner to your family?

A few people I've asked this question to told me that the whole dating scene is a quest for stability. They want the undivided attention and commitment, and they want to feel the longevity of a mutual loyalty towards one another. But I still find myself asking why? Why not be loyal to a friend, instead? What is it about a wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend that is different from, say, your best and oldest friends? Are they not as loyal?

To which the people I asked replied by stating that with your friends, they come and go. Whereas with a partner, you will never feel alone and you always know that they're there for you. You're not meant to be that codependent with friends, who have their own lives to lead. I mean, we imagine ourselves spending the later parts of our life with a wife and kids - not a group of five same-sex chums, right? So, I ask them, what about your relatives? Aren't your parents and siblings just as 'constant' as a partner is? Your family are also always there for you. So what makes a wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend any different from, say, your sister, your uncle, or your mother?

Someone answered me by saying that they want to feel be proud of 'working on a relationship'. Establishing a relationship with someone means that you both make suggestions, criticisms, sacrifices, and changes in personality and lifestyle, so as to create something impressive to others, and impressive to ourselves - confirmation of the fact that you can do something in this world, live in a house together and have children, contribute to the national consumerism in your purchases, to the real estate and education industries - while continually helping someone in particular better their life and, in turn, have your own life changed for the better by them. A very good argument, I must say, but I must ask, is that not what we do at school and at work? When we work on individual projects, we make suggestions and criticisms to steer a project in the right direction, we work just as hard, to improve business, and to give back to society. A lot of people can say they love their job. A lot of people can say they feel important in the line of work they do. Just like in a relationship. So what makes a wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend different from your co-worker or your company then?

One of my friends responded by saying that they want erraticity. They want to feel that thrill of a roller-coaster-like experience when dating another person. They want to fall for someone, and they want to 'feel', mutually, 'in love', to feel that rush, that sense of having no boundaries. Sometimes it's not about commitment and stability, it's about surprises, a pair of earrings on the pillow, an unexpected candlelight dinner at home, a new car parked outside with a bow tied on top of it.

I'll admit it - my best friend and my mother would never surprise me with a car, but a future wife might. I cannot think of a logical explanation for why this 'rush' is not really why we go into relationships, other than pointing out the reality that predictability often trumps unpredictability in this world. Those tacky surprises are only seen in romantic comedies and sitcoms and unrealistic. A majority of couples that exist around us are definitely not that exciting - teenage couples just go to the movies and fuck, middle-aged couples just have dinner dates and then they might fuck afterward, and the elderly, well, they just... read the newspaper.

Sure, she may be cute, but why not just get a dog?

He certainly is very, very smart, but why aren't you making a move on your professor?

She 'gets' you, you say? Get a shrink, who can psychoanalyze and understand you better than any girl will.

Yeah, yeah, he's really funny indeed - but, are you saying I'm not funny?

These reasons are superficial, all of the ones I've listed so far. Love is something felt, and not thought about. It's hard to explain why people bother with relationships.

One of my friends suggested that it was animal instinct, an uncontrollable compulsion that ultimately is meant to provide you with a mate with whom you can reproduce and propagate your genes with. Can you imagine using that as your answer when people ask you what makes your partner so great?

"Why do you love me so, honey?"
"Because I want my genetic material to be passed down to the next generation."